APIv4 Opens

Tornevall Networks has been saying there’s not enough time to finish off some bigger projects, only stored in mind, fast enough. However, due to the escalating situation I’ve been trying harder to get the time necessary for building even if it is sometimes nearly impossible. Sometimes it’s very much about the current mood that blocks the way forward.

But my ideas still lives. I see very much to my own needs of cleaner webspace to live in. As I explore the internet, I realize that sometimes I need some kind of rest from bigotry, racism and hatred. I can get this by building something that makes it possible to choose the content I want to see – even if the visiting platform not always allows me to do this. And for the concerns, I think it is for a good cause. Building this correctly, I think there’s a slight chance of surviving madness.

I’ve been planning this ever since I visited the fashion-ish blogger “Kissie” in a time when she was still young and her primary goals was to manipulate posts and comments, even if the target today is something even bigger. At the time mentioned, the targets were quite timy.

I’ve seen similar products being developed for Chrome, where politics can be easily filtered away – but mostly on Facebook. I’ve seen Trump filters, and so on in a long row of filtering software. But yet, noone seems to have been thinking bigger than this. There’s also other platforms that actually should take care of their content better. Probably this is prevented by the fact that this will need plenty of capacity – eventually.

But by reading about Facebook as a platform through Roger McNamees eyes – where democracy is at risk of underminig – I also realize that we can, and probably should, do a lot more. But by building something – even if it is for myself – that could be made publicly open, there is always a risk of abuse of the product. Democracy are always on a high stake for data maniplation and fake news. This is what I’m taking with me into this project, even if I’m aware of that this product is primarily built for my own sake of relaxation.

But the most important thing – as I believe this might go totally wrong, I’m thinking of opening up the source of the API base I’m imagining this could be built on. One goal is to decentralize as much as possible; if this idea is failing due to whatever comes in my way, the project itself should be harder to stop, by making people build their own solutions over the API. And maybe even better, by making this public, there could be other ways of making it better.

The base is on version 4.0 as the prior versions probably lack of very much that is needed to day, and probably could be improved. After all, I’m a very old fashioned backward-compatible-thinking developer. By seeing PHP rush forward with deprecations and such, I think it’s time to rethink a lot here. The API base is in an embryo state, and by itself it does very little. The major idea is to link chrome-, firefox- and maybe many other plugins with communication against it. The APIv4 base will hopefully be the primary engine of the filter itself.

The project tracker can be found below. This is what I hope will be the start of The Giraffe Project.